Tuesday, September 30, 2014

WITH ONE REPORTED EBOLA CASE---WHAT WE KNOW OF THIS VISITING FOREIGNER--NOW HERE IN DALLAS, NO DOUBT THE MSM AS WELL AS THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA IS REVVING UP TO PROMOTE EBOLA TERROR in a way that's worse than the terrible disease itself. It sells newspapers and gets gargantuan online hits as a new adrenaline high settles over our land. Ebola is not, NOT, the airborne transmitted 1918 flu that killed millions. Caution, massive pandemic fear-mongering ahead.

Ebola----horrific as it is in parts of west Africa---doesn't spread by casual contact like the flu; rather it spreads through direct contact with more intimate body fluids in one-on-one encounters up close and personal, as well as in close health care settings where patients expose others by giving off every kind of body fluid imaginable. These desperately sick people need our immediate aid, support and prayers.

KEITH KOFFLER @WHITE HOUSE DOSSIER HAS the full inside scoop --- everything you need to know and more---about the recent White House Fence Jumper Escapade. Evidently, this interloper made it through the main entrance and all the way down to the Green Room, fortunately, not when a men's yoga class led by the First Lady was underway. I can't help but think, this is just poetic justice for what's going on at our southern border...only thing we don't know is if this stunt was carried out by an illegal...what a gas that would be! His name, afterall is Gonzales....

Monday, September 29, 2014

UPDATE: STUART DOES PAGLIA JUSTICE @ HAD ENOUGH THERAPY
A DEADLY, DELUSIONAL MIX MEETS PAGLIA'S HARSH TRUTHS---OR HOW COLLEGES ARE MAJORING IN THE MINORSWRITING IN TIME THIS WEEK AND LINKED ON DRUDGE, CAMILLE PAGLIA FOCUSES HER COLUMN ON THE BEDROCK REALITY OF REAL EVIL IN THE WORLD and the naive silliness of modern college campuses to address the true problems in women's sexuality.

Her brilliant piece should be required reading on every college campus in the country, as well as in every American family that's raising girls who have no true grasp of the reality of evil or the power of sexual attraction in a fallen, often depraved world. Failure to teach ourselves and children about the dark forces in the world is a tragic mistake and commentary on modern society, over-protecting parenting. It's another reason why we would do well to take our children to Sunday school and church and teach them the Truth about evil. Anything else is a naive mistake, often with tragic consequences.

The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense..Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to thepolice, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.
The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.
There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.

1 “Come, all you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
2 Why spend money on what is not bread,
and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good,
and you will delight in the richest of fare.
3 Give ear and come to me;
listen, that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you...

6 Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call on him while he is near.
7 Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts...

11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
12 You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands.
13 Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,
and instead of briers the myrtle will grow.
This will be for the Lord’s renown,
for an everlasting sign,
that will endure forever.”...

From Ephesians 6--The Armor of God

10 Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.11 Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place,15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.19 Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel,20 for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.

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This past week completely got away from me. Living in the country, having too much to do, experiencing beautiful, cooler fall weather, and yes, enjoying my new SUP have all converged to keep me away from the computer......hopefully, I'll do better soon. Thanks for coming by!

THERE ARE TWO BIBLE STUDIES I DO DAILY, 7 DAYS A WEEK. Below are examples of insights from one of them---Quietwalk (QW). If you want to subscribe to this free daily email service, go here. I cannot imagine starting my day without it. Below are two insights from Paul's letters to the Romans.

INSIGHT

HOW GOD EVALUATES OUR LIVES:

There are
several commonly held misconceptions about how God evaluates the deeds of men.
One idea is that as long as we don't do anything "terrible," God will overlook
our "little" sins. Another is that God weighs all our good works on one side of
a scale and all our bad works on the other. If the good outweighs the bad, we're
okay. A third incorrect notion is that God lines up all the people who have ever
lived from the best to the worst and then divides them in half. If you make the
cut, you're okay. The truth the Bible teaches is that God demands sinlessness.
And since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, all people are
condemned. There is only one way out: Receive Jesus as your personal Savior.
Through Him, all your sins can be forgiven.

INSIGHT

THE DAILY STRUGGLE OF SURRENDERING OUR WILLS TO GOD

Our lives
are a constant struggle between our own wills and the will of God. The
circumstances of God's will are often strange and enigmatic; they do not always
make sense. However, His will is being worked out even in ways we cannot see or
understand. When we relinquish control of our lives and yield to God's will,
then peace, love, and joy will characterize our lives. Paul must have wondered
from time to time how shipwreck and imprisonment were working into God's will;
yet with historical perspective, we can see that good came of these events. In
the words of the old hymn, we must: "Trust and obey, for there´s no other way to
be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey."

Friday, September 19, 2014

Liberal arts institutions — and the nations that establish them — are meant to be bastions of open discourse. They have no responsibility to protect their students from viewpoints that make them “uncomfortable.” But all over the supposedly tolerant West, radical leftists have used their distaste for Ali’s viewpoints to justify silencing her under the flexible and slanderous accusation of “hate speech.” They succeeded in the Netherlands. They succeeded at Brandeis. I’m proud to say they didn’t succeed at Yale — not this time, anyway. Ali did speak on Monday, to a packed house and a standing ovation. Free expression — the bedrock of academic inquiry — won the day. To that, I say, Boola Boola: this kind of victory is becoming all too rare.

CONCENTRATING, CONCENTRATING....a tad far forward but soooo much fun! If you've ever done any paddling---canoe or kayak--- it's not hard to get the knack, though your center of gravity is higher so you have to get the feel of that. Otherwise, it's great upper body exercise.

The guys at ISLE in California are the best and after sending me an inflatable which I did not like and knew I never would (too hard to inflate fully enough to stand on with any degree of stability), they traded me for this little hard board which I'm simply crazy about. Will get another SUP next spring and try to drag friends and family to give it a try, after I've become a bit stronger on the board and can begin to help others. LOOOOOVE THIS! And the board is so much easier/lighter to carry and load in or on a car or truck than a kayak, making it much more accessible to use. Thanks to my bestest friend for supporting me in this and taking some photos.....wish he'd get out there with me.
It will be fun to SUP on some small lakes this fall and watch the beautiful fall foliage unfold.

Most pundits think the Scottish people will narrowly vote to stay. I wouldn't be surprised either way. Of course if it leaves there will be shockwaves for the British pound and unintended consequences on many fronts. But like any divorce, going through it could make Scotland better, stronger, more sovereign as a country.

Thought I would post below a few of my favorite photos from our beautiful wedding in Scotland a few years ago. Will update any interesting articles during the day.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

UPDATE--PAT BUCHANAN SCOTTISH VOTE: WHAT WOULD BRAVEHEART DO? WATCHING KEN BURNS MARVELOUS TV MARATHON DOCUMENTARY THE ROOSEVELTS THESE PAST FEW NIGHTS and seeing Eleanor and Franklin's marriage begin to disintegrate made me start to wonder why she stayed with him once she uncovered his infidelity with Lucy Mercer?

Undoubtedly devastated and humiliated, Eleanor eventually recovered and made up her mind to go her own way while staying with Franklin (albeit often bitterly) and enjoying the trappings of power, privilege and pedigree that her lot in life afforded her. She did it well (though it was never for her about being a doting mother to their five living children). Eleanor ultimately took responsibility for her part in their marriage breakdown as she admitted later in life that her frequent criticisms of her husband had no doubt contributed to driving him into the arms of another adoring women.

It's easy to see how history has repeated itself in the marital pacts made by other powerful couples like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

After seeing how many times the happily married Teddy Roosevelt tried to get re-elected to the White House after completing his terms there, I certainly can understand Bill Clinton's fascination with getting Hillary elected commander-in-chief and reliving his glory days again, even though she's really too old and in mediocre health to be a serious contender, in my opinion.

Whether one considers marital infidelity a deal-breaker today seems to depend on the couple, their spiritual and moral beliefs and values, their history and the ability to forgive and move forward together. Infidelity often goes hand-in-hand with emotional abuse and neglect of the marriage relationship and is symptomatic of deeper issues that need to be addressed.

In today's news, we are bombarded by one physical abuse headline after another, especially in the NFL. We're told it's only the tip of the iceberg and has been going on for years. Why is it that abused women both inside and outside of marriage, continue to stay in relationships that batter and humiliate them physically or emotionally without ever drawing a line in the sand? Why do women keep coming back for more from men who hit them physically or batter them emotionally, then turn around and tell these same women they deserve it and that everything is their fault. What's worse is that most of us who've been abused believe it and turn around and try to please these men even more---until we finally reach a complete breaking point.

I can only say from my own experience that women continue to take abuse from controlling men in all its hurtful forms, because they're afraid of loosing everything, including their children (which I did not), their sanity (barely), their financial resources, their friends. Family and friends simply don't want to hear about abuse, let along believe it. Often a woman who reports abuse is not taken seriously and rejected by friends. She's often written off as crazy and being' the problem.' which only tends to make a beaten down woman even more dispairing and desperate.

For my part, I learned that getting divorced with teenage children is no quick fix and rarely ends the blame and shame game if it existed before the marriage disintegrates. Sometimes it takes years, even decades, to end and grow out of habitual patterns of put downs, disrespect, rejection and contempt which go on openly, or behind closed doors.

For anyone who really wants to understand and end...I really mean end, a pattern or a relationship with a controlling man, I can say without reservation the finest book I've ever read is Dr. Kevin Leman's classic book, Smart Women Know When to Say No. The title may sound trivial or adolescently simple, but the book is pure dynamite. It's not just changed my life once, it keeps on changing it....and will forever. Thank you Dr. Leman for being a gift from God.

The good news is if you're not willing to settle into a strange marriage arrangement like Eleanor Roosevelt or Hillary Clinton or don't want to end up like Princess Diana, beaten down women will not be disappointed in Dr. Leman's incredibly good work. BTW, he doesn't suffer fools or long, drawn out talk-therapy lightly. Leman's approach is simple, action-oriented and demands major courage and prayer in the short and long terms. But the wisdom found and implemented here is ever so worth it.

Women who've been in abusive relationships with controlling men and are willing to do what it takes to get out, can and will ultimately succeed. Some can even stay married as they begin to have bottom lines and mean it. When real change happens they never again need to define themselves in terms of abuse and victimhood. New self-definition is now based on freedom from these addictive relationships. standing on our own two feet and letting the chips fall where they may. We discover that God is ultimately in control.

The NFL with its many high-powered sponsors is finally shining the light on physical abuse and that's a good thing. But the real and enduring work needs to be done by women themselves who learn to respect themselves enough to leave if necessary, and never look back. We also learn what love is and isn't. It takes practice and heaps of courage, but by the Grace of God, Leman's wisdom reverberates slowly changing the lives of all involved.Liife slowly becomes infused with deep gratitude.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

ANOTHER OF PASTOR MIKE ATKINS, OF RIVER CROSSING IN JACKSON HOLE, WISE SERMONS ON WISDOM. JAMES 1:5-8New International Version (NIV) 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6 But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.

All too often we try to deal with our challenges with human reasoning---trying to figure it out on our own----rather than through divine revelation and waiting on the Lord. God's answers are worth waiting for and far exceed anything we can conjure up on our own.

I COULD NOT AGREE MORE WITH SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN SPEAKING BELOW AFTER LAST NIGHT's SPEECH. The fact is that over the past four few years, we declared victory in Iraq and completely and naively pulled out with dire consequences.

Today, because we didn't leave a residual ground force there, and didn't keep our promises to help heavily arm the Kurds who are our greatest allies there, we are now back to ground zero---pun intended on 9/11---in Iraq and the Middle East. We have lost massive ground there and all the lives and money we invested count for almost nothing. McCain sums it up realistically as to how our feckless president has repeatedly ignored all the recommendations of his national security team over the years with the results we now confront in Iraq. Starting over---no matter what President Obama says----will be extremely costly and ultimately require boots on the ground, lots of special ops troops---as well as a strategic air campaign involving air sorties that hit and destroy multiple sites at once.

Our president has made a complete mess in the Middle East and lost all of our past investments of lives and taxpayers month there.
Here's an executive summary of the POTUS speech seen this morning at Zero Hedge: 1) We'll be bombing Syria, a sovereign nation, 2) we'll be arming terrorist groups while fighting them at the same time, and 3)the economy is great. What can possibly go wrong? Let's hope and pray we can make some headway in gaining some ground back sooner rather than later.

Thing is, it's not real. In order to hear and believe the Good News, you've got to be convicted of the bad news first. With this in mind, Caleb Flores has a wonderful reminder at The Gospel Coalition on 4 Things Jesus Did Not Die For. Can you guess what they are before reading the piece? There are many other reason Jesus did not die for, but these are surely a good start:Christians have a ready-made response to the question, “Why did Jesus die?” The answers are usually something along these lines: “Jesus died to save me from my sins.” Often when I get answers like these, I feel like asking, “And. . . ?” I don’t ask follow-up questions just to be annoying. I do it because many professing believers genuinely have never thought through the reasons for, and the implications of, Jesus’ death on the cross. Unfortunately, many Christians, if really pressed for a logical argument for the atoning death of Christ, won’t have a good answer.

And because of the lack of clarity regarding Jesus’ death, deceitful doctrines have crept into our churches.The Scriptures have been twisted into cultural clichés and false teachings about why Christ died, and what was accomplished by his death.

Here are four things Jesus didn’t die for.

It's a great piece to read and meditate on ahead of a new week, starting with 1) Jesus did not die for your American Dream. Or, the health, wealth and prosperity gospel is a false teaching.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

JOSH BROWN @ THE REFORMED BROKER HAS A THOUGHT-PROVOKING PIECE UP on the new recruitment of terrorists via social networks. It's well-worth reading:

There is a new terror movement on the other side of the world that is crowdsourcing social misfits from every corner of the globe, recruiting via interactive marketing and social media in a manner befitting a Fortune 500 company rolling out a new product. Just yesterday, terrorists were sneaking video cassettes of their rants to the mainstream media via elaborate networks of shadowy operatives and untraceable handoffs in the dark. Today they’re uploading videos of murder directly to Youtube, on Google-owned servers. They’re posting selfies to Instagram, propaganda to Facebook and keeping the world updated about their exploits on Twitter. They’re branding and thought-leadering. They’re communicating with the White House over the World Wide Web. They’re doing what a top-flight consultant might recommend to Tide detergent or TIME Magazine – “Join the conversation!”

None of this would have been possible just a short time ago. Osama’s gang could never have taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times, even if they’d paid in cash. The reach they’d have gotten by doing so, by today’s standards, would be quaint. In 2014, a millennial terrorist (yes, that’s what they are) with a laptop and a modicum of social media savvy could easily amplify a message like that by several orders of magnitude without even getting out of bed.

Obama doesn’t have a strategy. How can he? In 2003, we wondered what could possibly be worse than Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad? Now you know. Syria has a population of 22 million and an estimated 10 million of them are classified as refugees. Mass murderers now control a territory with a landmass the size of Great Britain. Overnight. There’s a burgeoning realization that what we’re watching is a region-wide, religious civil war – something that has to be fought out, with oceans of blood an inevitability rather than merely a bad option. There are no options for us, we can’t help. It’s 1300 years in the making, even if the Western intervention in Iraq sped it up. “Let the animals kill each other,” is a common refrain in bars and coffee shops across America

Joan was a tough broad who could dish it out and laugh at herself as poignantly as she could Sarah Palin. While I could never get on board with all her surgeries and botox, she was a dame who never hesitated to be politically incorrect and let the chips fall where they may.

The public discourse will forever be duller now that she's gone. She will be missed. I know her family, especially Melissa, will miss her mother terribly. May God bless and comfort her family.

Monday, September 1, 2014

PLEASE, HELP ME UNDERSTAND. What dots am I not connecting about this non-story?

Let me get this straight: narcissistic celebrity women who don't get enough attention already----ever----because 24/7/365 adoration is never sufficient---take lewd nude selfies then upload them to the Internet? For reasons unknown to most of us, they do this without even thinking twice? Then Surprise! the inevitable hack job comes from pros from around the world, and they're incensed, shocked and horrified? Incensed, shocked and horrified, I tell you!

Who in her right mind would do such a thing? Is there not one iota of decorum or modesty left in the celebrity world? What pathetic role models these children trying-to-act-like- adults really are. How sad. How utterly desperate. How they are their own invasion of privacy. And most of all, what utter bores.

About Me

I'm a southern Christian conservative with a degree in civil & environmental engineering and a passion for the truth of God's Word, writing, hiking, investing, fly fishing, cooking and the great outdoors. My favorite tech invention = spellcheck. There are no such things as rights without responsibility, a free lunch, cheap grace, man-made climate change, successful government engineering, or figuring out when life begins. We're hurling towards the abyss with only One Life-Line: it's not botox, a "living" Constitution, celebrity president, or making nice with Iran. Meanwhile, God gave us His Word, His Son, Grace Upon Grace, family/friends and the greatest country in the world to live--if we can keep it. E-mail: webutante07 at gmail dot com. Thanks for coming by.

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine, Till all success be nobleness, And every gain divine!